In September 1848 three young London art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — founded a secret society in a Bloomsbury bedroom and signed their pictures with the initials PRB. They were attacking three centuries of European academic painting. Seven paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-generation followers.

In the autumn of 1851, John Everett Millais set up his easel beside a slow tributary of the Hogsmill River in Surrey and began to paint a stretch of riverbank twelve feet wide. He worked there eleven hours a day, six days a week, through autumn rain and winter cold, for four months. He painted every plant in front of him from life: the dog rose, the loosestrife, the meadowsweet, the willow, the forget-me-nots, refusing to invent a single leaf. There was no figure in the paint